Constellations
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: "You and I, we've barely scratched the surface."


As a kid, John knew about all the constellations, about the heroes and beasts and gods stretching their adventures across the sky outside his bedroom window. He'd stare into the streetlight-faded sky, and he'd picture the voyages and quests and battles going on up there, and he'd try to piece together slivers of the old stories between the roofs of buildings, and he'd fall asleep dreaming about the kind of people who lived their lives spread across the sky.

In Afghanistan, the skies were sometimes so clear at night that he could make out the constellations he'd only read about as a kid, every star so bright that it seemed impossible he'd ever missed it. He'd lie awake, mind running through the most horrible images, and bits of half-remembered legend would flit into his awareness- _bullet nicked the kid's subclavian, too much blood, not enough time, not enough time, and somehow through it all the story of Orion, the doomed hunter_-

He'd shrugged it off as one of the more bizarre side effects of his doubtlessly extensive psychological trauma, brought it up in passing when he was still seeing his therapist, and she'd spoken to him about regression, about how the whole thing was his mind's way of trying to find a place it felt safe. He hadn't argued the point; he never did.

But every time the sun came up, every time the London sky settled on a colour somewhere between blue and grey, he'd still feel a chill down his back, imagining the stories that were being told, unseen, among the stars.

* * *

After the third time Sherlock took up target practice against the wall – he claimed to be working on his aim after the Golem incident, though John suspected he was running some elaborate experiment involving the effects of cheerful bullet-ridden happy faces on the human psyche – Mrs. Hudson threw them out for a week while she brought in someone to see to the drywall. Oh, it was an annoyance and an inconvenience, but John decided that Sherlock's livid expression of disbelief was well worth the price.

Now he hurried to catch up with Sherlock, whose long-legged stride was somewhat less calm than usual. "You couldn't expect her patience to last forever."

Sherlock ignored him, though his footfalls seemed a bit louder than usual. Stomping. Working himself up to a full-fledged tantrum, John suspected. He tried again: "I mean, what did you think was going to happen? Now we're homeless for a week."

That prompted no response at all, and when John finally caught up the few steps still separating them, he was thoroughly unsurprised to see a mobile in Sherlock's hand. It wasn't his usual phone, though, and it looked a bit like-

"Hang on, did you pinch Mrs. Hudson's mobile?"

"Borrowed it," Sherlock said, without looking up. "Mine was on the table upstairs, and she seemed disinclined to let us in."

"So you picked her pocket," John said, trying to maintain an appropriately disapproving tone of voice. He didn't think he was having much success.

"Of course not," Sherlock said, sounding affronted, and he glanced up for a moment. "It was on the table. I picked it up on our way out."

"Of course. How silly of me."

They walked in silence for some time, and John found himself suppressing the urge to guide Sherlock down the streets; he seemed to have a preternatural ability to navigate without ever glancing up from his mobile, an ability John had previously thought endemic only among teenage girls.

After a full fifteen minutes of silence and apparently aimless wandering, John decided he'd had enough. "What, is there a case?"

Sherlock glanced up, a bit too sharply. "If Mrs. Hudson heard you with that pathetic eagerness in your voice, she'd think it positively indecent." Before John could get a word in edgewise, Sherlock held up his mobile. "Lestrade seems to think my ability to interrupt his press conferences borders on some kind of magic. It is, of course, merely contingent on keeping an up-to-date register of each journalist's mobile number."

"Ah," John said. "And the memory on Mrs. Hudson's mobile is shockingly lacking in that particular area."

"Not entirely," Sherlock said, and went back to staring at the tiny screen. "I borrowed it a few years ago, and the numbers are all still there. It's just a bit out of date."

They were quiet a while longer. "Did it never occur to you to borrow my phone?"

"Of course it did," Sherlock said. "I borrowed it yesterday. It's on the table upstairs, next to mine."

John sighed, but he could feel a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "I appreciate that. Thanks."

"No time for that now," Sherlock said, and, slipping the phone back into his pocket, he broke into a run.

It took John a second to catch up. "What? Why?"

"The pearls, John. Eddie MacDiarmid's been smuggling them all along."

John's smile broke free, and Sherlock cast him a sidelong glance. "Sorry," John said, and composed his features. "That's amazing. I didn't even know you were on a case. How did you-?"

"The ears, John. The ears." And with that titbit of remarkably useless information, he turned a corner so quickly John nearly lost sight of him.

By the time Mrs. Hudson issued a formal invitation for them to rejoin her at their previous lodgings – this time with firm language in the lease concerning the indoor use of firearms – they'd led the police to arrest five known smugglers, they'd narrowly escaped mortal peril three times, and John had very nearly succeeded in eating a complete meal before Sherlock dragged him away to investigate the next clue.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, John realised he'd never been happier in his life.

* * *

It was a given that Moriarty was still at large.

How he'd managed to escape the fire at the swimming pool was beyond John's understanding, but if he'd learned one thing about Sherlock, it was to trust him when he claimed something to be true. Any suggestion that Moriarty had died in the conflagration was met with a derisive sniff, and any attempt to point out that there'd been a body discovered in the wreckage received only a raised eyebrow and half-pitying glare in return.

It came as no surprise to John, then, when the body at the pool was finally revealed to have been nobody in particular. Sherlock didn't even dignify the news with a reaction, just went back to watching telly with a single-minded intensity that made Lestrade grin and roll his eyes before going back downstairs.

John knew better, and he waited, standing behind Sherlock's chair and watching his friend identify the more obvious forgeries on an episode of Antiques Roadshow. After some time, Sherlock touched the remote, and the two of them remained in silence the rest of the evening, watching the shadows grow longer with the setting sun.

* * *

It was bound to happen someday.

John had been making a game attempt to follow up on an interview with a witness all day, having chased the man across London three times before he realized the epic pursuit was entirely one-sided: the other man was simply so forgetful that he'd had to return home several times to pick up items he'd forgotten. He hadn't provided any new information, though he'd been candid and friendly enough, and through the entire interview, John felt his left hand twitching, felt the sweat down the small of his back, knew there was something else going on here.

By the time he finally decided to trust his instincts and race home, he was prepared to forgive Sherlock anything – shooting up the walls of their flat, dragging him awake at all hours, always insisting on making the final confrontation alone – if only he'd done the sensible thing on this particular occasion and _waited_.

The door was open when he arrived, and John swallowed hard, grabbed his shaking left hand with his right – and that was wrong, all wrong, because if this wasn't stress, what was? – and shouldered the door open, trying to tread lightly, too caught up in his own adrenaline rush to coordinate his body properly.

Sherlock was on the sofa, curled into a tight ball, arms wrapped around his knees. "Ah," he said, in a strange, reedy voice. "John. Apparently we should have been after the man with the blue thumb after all."

And with that, he started shaking, and for a moment, John thought he was laughing, and then he was close enough to see the blood-

John had performed complicated first aid under fire without flinching; even after he'd been shot in Afghanistan, even after heat and pain and blissful numbness in his shoulder, he'd managed to lean over and stop the man next to him from bleeding out with a well-placed clamp and an improvised dressing. In the months since he'd met Sherlock Holmes, he'd been called upon to investigate any number of gruesome deaths, and he'd done so calmly. Hell, he'd done it with a modicum of fascination that went beyond the purely professional.

Now, trying to staunch the bleeding in Sherlock's chest, John couldn't think of anything beyond the tremor in his hand, couldn't tell the exact position of the wound, or which organs were likely to have been affected, or even what type of gun the shooter had used. He'd dialled 999, and then he'd applied pressure and waited, feeling an echo of his own tremors in Sherlock's faltering pulse.

The recovery was a long one, and Sherlock was far from the ideal patient. A week after the shooting, John received a somewhat panicked call from a nurse: she'd found Sherlock down in the morgue, apparently convinced that one of the bodies down there was not actually dead. Once they'd bustled Sherlock back to his room and tutted over his torn stitches, they'd apparently discovered that the man in question was, in fact, merely under the influence of an extremely powerful narcotic; Sherlock had noticed a telltale smudging on his fingertips as the man had been wheeled down the corridor outside his room.

"Your friend's a hero," the nurse said, and John hung up without saying another word.

It took him three weeks to work up the nerve to visit Sherlock in hospital, and when he did, Sherlock said, "Have you considered the possibility of a second murderer?" as though he'd never left.

After five minutes of banal conversation, John finally snapped, shoving himself to his feet with enough force to send his chair skidding back across the room. "What the hell were you thinking, confronting him alone? And you sent me off on a wild goose chase, so that- what? So you could get off on the danger you were putting yourself in? So you could arrange a meeting of the minds with someone who's even a fraction as interesting as Moriarty?"

Sherlock was silent, and for a second he seemed shockingly pale, and John met his eyes, flexing the fingers of his left hand, over and over. Sherlock looked away first.

"I didn't- I just didn't want to put you in danger," Sherlock said, very softly. "That's all."

For a very long time, John had thought that human decency was just another thing that Sherlock considered to be useless trivia, like the Earth rotating around the sun. Lately, he'd started theorizing that Sherlock had merely succeeded in mastering the ability to understand human decency while simultaneously holding it in utter contempt. He'd begun feeling confident about his assessment of the man, had even managed to anticipate his actions on several occasions based on that analysis.

Now, even as they steered the conversation back toward safer ground, John suspected he'd never manage to completely understand Sherlock Holmes.

* * *

John hadn't seen Sherlock in weeks.

That in itself wasn't particularly unusual: when he was pursuing a sensitive case, particularly overseas, Sherlock would remain incommunicado for extended periods. What had started bothering John were the increasingly frequent texts from Mycroft:_ What of SH?_ and _Have you heard from him? _and _Answer, please._

In Sherlock's absence, John had been working on a couple of assignments for Lestrade – little things, the kind that would barely warrant Sherlock's notice on a good day. For all the times Sherlock had managed to make John feel the fool, he still fancied he'd managed to pick up a fair bit of deductive acumen along the way. All his blogging about Sherlock's exploits – and the additional research that necessitated – had given him a decent memory, and anyone who spent more than five minutes around Sherlock would have a good appreciation of minutiae by necessity. He'd managed a decent success rate, in any case, and the small problems kept him from worrying too much about the things he couldn't change.

Sometime around three o'clock, a clatter in the sitting room dragged him out of uncertain dreams about stars. He retrieved his gun, but when he flung open his bedroom door and flicked on the lights, he saw only Sherlock, looking bedraggled and considerably more twitchy than usual, dragging himself through the window.

"Sherlock? What the hell are you-"

"A little quiet would be advisable," Sherlock snapped, with a harshness to his tone that John didn't recognize.

"I- But how did you-" John paused, decided he really didn't want to know. "I'll just go see if there's some tea, maybe-"

"No time," Sherlock said, and repeated it under his breath, rubbing his hands together. For a second, John wondered if he'd been indulging in something a bit stronger than nicotine patches, but there was a sharp clarity to his gaze. "No, I have to go. This is a foolish risk."

John took a step forward. "Sherlock, just sit down for a second."

"I can't," Sherlock said, and promptly started pacing. "I'll attract attention if I stay for long. I have to go, John. I came to say goodbye."

"Goodbye?" John blinked. His brain didn't feel entirely awake just yet. "What do you mean, goodbye? Your brother's worried sick. I should-"

Sherlock grabbed his wrist before he could reach for his mobile, and his grip was so strong that John felt his hand spasm. "You can't do that, John. If there's one person in the world I can't tell, it's Mycroft. As far as he's concerned, I just disappeared off the face of the Earth."

John stared at Sherlock. "As far as he's concerned? What about as far as I'm concerned?"

Sherlock released his hand, turned away, too fast, and leaned out the window. "I should go. I shouldn't have come."

"It's Moriarty," John said, with dawning horror. "Isn't it? You're going off to- to face him. To finish it."

"You do have a flair for the dramatic," Sherlock said, with a little half-smile. "No wonder Mycroft's so fond of you."

John blinked again. "Mycroft?"

"He only baffles the people he really cares about," Sherlock said, and reached down for something just outside the window that turned out to be a rope, connected to some sort of grappling hook. Somehow, John wasn't surprised that Sherlock owned a grappling hook. "Yes, John, it's about Moriarty. He's tried to kill me five times already, and I've finally started following the clues. Switzerland, John. He's going to Switzerland."

And, without any warning, Sherlock jumped out the window, slid to the ground with a speed that made John wince. By the time he'd managed to get downstairs, Sherlock was gone.

Five seconds after that, John had resolved to follow him, no matter the cost.

* * *

As a child, John Watson had loved the constellations for their simple mysteries, for their beauty, for the fact that they were always up there somewhere, even if he couldn't see them. As a soldier, he'd come to fear the constellations, because they spoke of mystical wars and plots and schemes unknowable to humanity, and there was more than enough of that on Earth to go around.

And as he followed Sherlock Holmes to the Reichenbach Falls, to what lay beyond, John found himself looking to the sky, searching for those familiar points of light, but the air was heavy, the clouds thick, and everywhere was the promise of rain.


End file.
